1,083 karma · joined February 16, 2011
Flame offers more out-of-the-box features, while with Bullseye2D you have to build many things yourself, but it doesn't force you into a predefined structure as much. The API is more prodcedural style, making it relatively quick to learen in its entirety, without too much "magic" happening under the hood.
I think for most people Flame would be the better choice (it is also been around longer, which means better support...), however, I really love extremly simple approaches. I also believe it has advantages when you tailor your systems and architecture to your own requirements. Lots of stuff in 2D Game Development is also extremly simple (so often having to deal with a complex physics module or rendering pipeline or entity component system is contraproductive).
It's based on a private fork of this (discontinued) language: https://github.com/blitz-research/monkey
I also thought about if I should offer it as Download on my website, but I don't know if anyone on PC nowadays still would install games via an unknown website :-)
Then when I replaced the graphics I continously added new features as well and a popular video game musician (Chris Hülsbeck) joined the project. Now with so much talent working for the project I felt like the gamedesign wasn't a good match for it anymore, so I basically started over (I thought about this for a month or two, then finally throw away all source code and restarted without realizing that I have basically threw a nearly finished game away). This sounds pretty dumb in retrospective, but back then I just didn't saw it.
So I changed my strategy. I searched for companies I found interesting that were looking for permanent employees. And I approached them with my resume and a nice mail that I wanted to work as a freelancer, not an employee, and offered to meet - even if they weren't interested in freelancers. Simply to get to know each other.
In the weeks that followed, I had many meetings and found some very good companies to freelance for over the years.
Of course, this might not work for larger companies because the HR department doesn't have the power to decide whether to work with a freelancer or not. But I found it very satisfying to work with smaller companies, and it also resulted in some friendships/contacts that went beyond the collaboration.
(Note: As of today I no longer doing contract work because I started to work full time on my own projects)
There is also something similar from the EU, but I don't know how this works exactly: https://www.eacea.ec.europa.eu/grants/2014-2020/creative-eur...
I'm working on it on and off since 2012, but now working fulltime on it since last year.
The game has art by Henk Nieborg and music by Chris Hülsbeck. They are two heroes of my youth, so this is really an absolute dream come true for me.
The player’s main weapon is Mjölnir – a magic hammer – that bounces off enemies and walls. So the player has to carefully aim and use the environment to do bouncy trick shots to defeat enemies or solve physic-based puzzles. This leads to all kinds of crazy and funny situations.
Some WIP Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TWTpi3D4IFA
We have an office, but everyone can work from where-ever he wants to (actually the freelancers are from all around the world). Since Covid hit we're operating 100% remote before most of the time we worked with 2 people in the office the rest of us remotely.
Everyone works as much or less as he wants, can take days off whenever he feels like.
We do have voice calls from time to time when it's appropriate, but in 99.9% only two people are involved and it usually happens when we have the feeling it would clarify faster as by asynchronous chat (for example when screen share is involved to demonstrate something). Actually I wouldn't even call it meetings because we mostly don't even setup a schedule, it just naturally happens (for example chatting about a specific topic, then deciding a call would be easier / faster).
It works well for us, but I think it would be a lot harder if we were more people as we don't have anyone who organizes or manages the project and the people.
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